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Introducing Orb

A native macOS menu-bar app that keeps your agent sessions one keystroke away: a Liquid-Glass dock with a live terminal and a column of titled session bubbles.

If you live in Claude Code, you probably have more than one session going at once: one refactoring a module, one writing tests, one you left running an hour ago and half-forgot about. Terminal tabs and windows scatter them across your desktop. Orb keeps them in one place, one keystroke away.

What it is

Orb is a native macOS menu-bar app. Press a global hot key (⌃⌥Space by default) and a Liquid-Glass dock slides in from the right edge of your screen: a large, resizable terminal on the left, and a column of session bubbles on the right. Each bubble is a titled row, one live claude session with its name and a one-line subtitle, so you read the column at a glance instead of decoding monograms.

Click a session and its terminal swaps in instantly. The process never restarts, because Orb only hides and shows terminal views, so a long-running session keeps its exact place while you glance at another.

One list, everywhere

By default your sessions live in one shared list. Open the dock on any Space, display, or window and you get the same set, in the same order, never hidden behind whichever Space you happen to be on. A quiet comet of Aurora light rides the rim of any row whose agent is working, so a busy session is obvious without a color-only cue.

┌───────────────────────┬─────────────────────┐
│                       │  R  Refactor auth    │ ← live session (ring + comet)
│      TERMINAL         │     Container        │
│   (resizable width)   │                      │
│                       │  W  Write tests      │
│                       │     Local            │
│                       │  ─────────────────   │
│                       │   +     ▦     ⚙      │ ← new · running · settings
└───────────────────────┴─────────────────────┘

Prefer to keep work and experiments apart? Turn on per-Space scoping in Settings and each session sticks to the Mission Control Space it was created on. That option leans on a private macOS API, wrapped so it degrades cleanly to one shared list if the platform ever stops answering. Here is how that works.

Built to disappear

Orb is at its best when you forget it's there:

  • No permissions by default. The hot key uses Carbon's system API, so there's no Accessibility prompt. Per-Space identity uses a private CoreGraphics call.
  • Restore on launch. Quit or restart, and your bubbles come back and resume with claude --continue.
  • A shell when you need it. Toggle a Terminal pane beside the Claude pane from the dock header to inspect files or roll back a change. Both panes stay live.

It's free and requires macOS 26 (Tahoe). Download it, press the hot key, and bring your sessions to the surface.